Spanish is one of the world’s top five most spoken languages, with a total of 20 officially speaking Spanish countries. In recent years, the number of people that speak Spanish at home has largely increased in the U.S. Since the Spanish language is vastly used, mobile brands are starting to provide more services in their native language, hoping to attract attention from Spanish-speaking customers.
How Much Time Do Hispanics Spend On Their Phones
With approximately 61 million Americans of Hispanic heritage, Hispanics in the U.S. are among the most avid smartphone users. Spanish-speaking adults spend more than 14 hours a week engaged in their phones, using a great majority of applications, according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report statistics.
According to the report, Spanish speakers spend an average of 658 minutes per month on their phones, which is strikingly higher than the average consumer’s 510 minutes per month.
Since they represent a broad majority of the population, between 480 and 577 million people, and are such massive consumers of smartphones, mobile phone companies have started offering more and more services in Spanish. These include offering products with Spanish language settings, providing customer support in Spanish, and ensuring that marketing materials and branding are culturally appropriate to satisfy the consumers.
If we take into consideration the Spanish population and the hours they spend on their phones, the mobile industry could easily profit billions of dollars only from their Spanish consumers if they provided the right services and met their expectations.
However, mobile companies are not the only ones who saw the potential of Spanish consumers; the gambling industry has also jumped on the trend. It is producing more Spanish Speaking Casinos than ever, where players can enjoy the gaming content and all other casino services in their native language.
Not All Apps Are Created Equal
Just like modern-day smartphones, all popular apps have the option to change the main setting to different types of languages. Google has even made it possible to set the Google Assistant in the language set in your Android settings, allowing Spanish speakers to communicate with the assistant in their native language.
Nevertheless, users don’t want only to use the big and popular apps for social media purposes. They also download apps for gaming, music, picture or video editing, and so on, and this is where the issue occurs.
Because these applications are not in such high demand, they don’t usually offer many options for consumers. They are most likely set in English so that the vast majority may understand, and they don’t do much to appeal more to other customers. In return, this cuts the popularity of such apps and makes them less marketable for the bigger customer pool.
Final Thoughts
Although social media apps and other software with a wider audience reach offer advanced settings for Spanish speakers, the same cannot be said about all mobile apps in the market – from photo editors to android casinos. Investing in such a feature and appealing to the Spanish-speaking community may be too costly for some smaller companies, but research shows their potential profit is worth the investment.
